The Experience of Anesthesia Awareness
The most traumatic case of anesthesia awareness is full consciousness during surgery with pain and explicit recall of intraoperative events. In less severe cases, patients may have only poor recollection of conversations, events, pain, pressure, or difficulty in breathing. Some cases of difficulty in breathing are caused by intubation errors and/or problems with the ventilator and a patient might be suffocating.
The experiences of patients who have experienced anesthesia awareness vary widely depending on why they became aware, whether they were paralyzed and patient responses and sequelae vary widely as well. It is unusual for someone having experienced awareness without pain or suffocation to suffer bad sequelae. The experience may be extremely traumatic for the patient or not at all depending on whether they could breathe and what errors were made.
Because the medical staff may not know if a person is unconscious or not, it has been suggested that the staff maintain the professional conduct that would be appropriate for a conscious patient.
Read more about this topic: Anesthesia Awareness
Famous quotes containing the words experience and/or awareness:
“You can’t, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty. And least of all can you condemn an artist pursuing, however humbly and imperfectly, a creative aim. In that interior world where his thought and his emotions go seeking for the experience of imagined adventures, there are no policemen, no law, no pressure of circumstance or dread of opinion to keep him within bounds. Who then is going to say Nay to his temptations if not his conscience?”
—Joseph Conrad (1857–1924)
“The toddler’s wish to please ... is a powerful aid in helping the child to develop a social awareness and, eventually, a moral conscience. The child’s love for the parent is so strong that it causes him to change his behavior: to refrain from hitting and biting, to share toys with a peer, to become toilet trained. This wish for approval is the parent’s most reliable ally in the process of socializing the child.”
—Alicia F. Lieberman (20th century)